This application relates generally to content delivery of documents, and specifically to retrieving partial document content to be displayed on a limited memory and/or bandwidth device and indicating the skipped content from the original document to the user.
Electronic documents are produced using various computer programs, such as word processors, spreadsheet programs, financial software, and presentation software. In addition to textual information, documents can contain navigational information in the form of table of content, bookmarks and hyperlinks. This navigational information allows the user of the computer programs the ability to quickly move to relevant sections of the document by clicking on a navigational link as defined by a table of content or hyperlink pointing to a bookmark. By using a navigational link the computer program will immediately reposition the content in the document to the desired section of the document and thereby eliminate the need for the user to traverse the document on a sequential page-by-page basis until the desired section of content is found.
When the user of a mobile communication device, or other limited memory and/or bandwidth device, wishes to access an electronic document which resides on a remote computer, and view the document on the mobile communication device, the entire electronic document is typically transmitted over a potentially bandwidth-constrained wireless network to the mobile communication device. For example, if a user wishes to view only the one-page terms and conditions section at page 100 of a 400-page document, the preceding 99 pages must first be transmitted to the device, which is costly and time consuming from a network limitation perspective. Yet, the user only views one page on the mobile device (i.e. page 100).
Once on the device, the electronic document is viewed using the mobile communication device's user interface, which typically differs from the user interface used to create and view the document on a personal computer. For example, while the user interface on a personal computer used to create an electronic document may include a large, color display and a pointing device such as a mouse, the mobile communication device may have a small, non-color screen, and may not have a mouse. In addition, the mobile communication device typically has greater processing power and memory limitations than a computer used to view the electronic document, which may be very large in size.